“Lascivious predispositions on the part of a maternal uncle towards his niece are…unthinkable and unpardonable in law,” the Delhi High Court has remarked while upholding the conviction of a man, who used to rape his niece whenever he found her alone in the house.
A Bench of C. Hari Shankar and Justice S.P. Garg said they “cannot lose site of the fact that the appellant [uncle] took unholy sexual advantage of his niece, qua whom he ought, practically, to have been a father figure.”
It reduced the sentence of the convict from life imprisonment to 10 years in prison.
The incident came to fore in July 2013, when the victim’s father lodged a complaint at Begum Pur Police Station.
He alleged that his brother-in-law residing with him since three years has been sexually assaulting his daughter.
Immediately, the police arrested the uncle.
‘Wrong acts’
The victim, who claims to have studied upto Class V, in her statement before the court said that her maternal uncle often used to sexually harass her.
“One day when there was nobody at home, my uncle on some pretext took me to his room. He tied my hands and mouth and forcefully committed wrong acts [galat kaam] with me,” she said in her statement.
“I was weeping a lot. When I said I will tell my mother everything, he threatened to throw acid on me and defame me. I got scared. Since that day, whenever I was alone at home, my uncle did wrong acts [galat kaam] with me,” she added.
The medical examination revealed that the victim’s hymen was torn.
The Bench relied on the statement given by the victim to convict the uncle saying, “We do not find any such material which could serve to discredit any of the allegations made by the prosecutrix [victim] against the appellant [uncle]”.
The Bench also rejected the submission, made on behalf of the convict, that the victim was a consenting party in the sexual relation.
It, however, quashed the conviction of the uncle under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POSCO) saying the evidence available was insufficient to prove that the offence took place before she attained the age of 16.
